1. Selling groceries online represents just 2.3%, or $160bn, of a worldwide grocery market of $7trn.
2. By selling expertise from almost 20 years as a online grocer to supermarkets in America and elsewhere, he wants to help them become a fourth force in the industry—able to resist Amazon, Walmart and Alibaba.
3. Mr Steiner, a former Goldman Sachs bond trader, has pulled off the rare feat of making home-delivery both tolerable for shoppers and profitable for sellers.
4. More than 30 years ago, doctors in the northern city of Daqing began a pioneering long-term study into the prevention of type-2 diabetes, a disease which was then thought to affect about 1% of Chinese.
5. There is growing pressure for fundamental reform of China’s policy on the trade in wild animals following the outbreak of a novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV), which to date has infected over 31,000 and killed more than 600, with numbers rising.
6. Commanding the plot lines of Hollywood films, covers of magazines and reams of newsprint, the contest between artificial intelligence (AI) and mankind draws much attention.
7. An exponential increase in the availability of digital data, the force of computing power and the brilliance of algorithms has fuelled excitement about this formerly obscure corner of computer science.
8. The competition today is not between humans and machines but among the world's technology giants, which are investing feverishly to get a lead over each other in AI.
9. The West's largest tech firms, including Alphabet (Google's parent), Amazon, Apple, Facebook, IBM and Microsoft are investing huge sums to develop their AI capabilities, as are their counterparts in China.
10. The Amazon Rainforest may be perilously close to the tipping-point beyond which its gradual transformation into something closer to steppe cannot be stopped or reversed, even if people lay down their axes.
11. Imagine that by 2030 global temperatures are still creeping up, and sea levels are tens of centimetres higher-significantly worsening the impact of storm surges that push seawater over low-lying areas and corrode coastal infrastructures.
12. Over the past two years investors and executives watching the trade tensions between America and China have veered between panic and nonchalance.
13. Hopes for a cathartic deal that would settle the countries’ differences have helped global stockmarkets rise by a bumper 13% this year.